My Classroom 2.0

As any teacher knows, the last few weeks of school are apocalyptic in tone. There is a drop dead date that the school is rushing towards, and little can get accomplished. Plus I had the other issue of changing classrooms to do before I left for the summer. I have not cleaned up my other office yet, but I at least got most of the stuff moved.

It looks like I will have seven computers in the class for student use. Then I can also go to labs as I need. This should be enough to get started with my ideas. My schedule is not finalized as of yet, but I will be teaching US History after 1870 for 11th grade and Government/Economics for 12th grade. If numbers are crazy I may also be saddled with a 9th grade World Geography class or a Computer Applications class also. We are using a truly insane schedule next year. We have traditionally been on block schedules, four classes of approximately an hour and forty minutes each semester. This year there is a focus on AP because of a grant the system received. There was a question about AP students who took the class first semester having five months between the class and the test. So instead of making AP classes all year long, administration on the school and district level decided in their infinite wisdom to have first semester classes one day and second semester the next, upsetting the apple cart for everyone so an extra thirty kids will hopefully do better on the AP exam. The infinite wisdom of bureaucracy. I guess scheduling is a decision way beyond my pay grade.

If you remember, I had a Joomla site that I was going to base http://www.colemanspace.info around. After playing with Joomla a bit, I feel it is a great CMS, but not what I was looking for. Setting up a learning community on it seemed a little klugey. So I backed it up (just in case) and installed Drupal 6. Once again, a bit of a learning curve. But it is going well and I think I can bend it to my whim.

Wikis however seem sort of a kluge under Drupal, especially under 6. I have looked around and found a couple of plugins to integrate user authentication between Drupal and Mediawiki. This may be the solution. Another issue is deciding if I want a different wiki for each class. I think to do that I would set up a Media Wiki install in a subdirectory (/class1, /class2, etc) and tie user authentication back into the Drupal user base. Anyone having any suggestions on how to run wikis over multiple classes, please drop me a line.

I backed up all of the classes in last year’s Moodle install and wiped it out. I reinstalled from the ground up with 1.9 and I am good to go. I plan to require user authentication this year. After a test, I found that Gaggle can receive emails from my web apps (and Google apps registration too!) so I am going to first make sure they all have a functioning Gaggle account and then they can register for the Moodle install.